Triptych of the Insomniac’s 3-chambered heart

1.            The valley of alms is where I bury the sun
skinned goddess that Mother one night transfigured 
into. The clouds crack into red spit, just as I’m about 
to cry and I’m compelled to think about the vermillion 
covers of school textbooks. I try being molecular 
to suck in tears. Who could have thought that funeral 
is another word for magic? In the expanding slit 
between the spine of a fat hardbound book 
and the arch of its pages, callused fingers 
from far lands find home. This despite knowing 
they will be crushed when the book is closed. 
The book is no book; it is a stack of birds 
eating birds. It is constitution. Any turbulence sublimates 
the last chamber of the traveling heart into echo. 
I’m afraid to call it resonance.           

2.            When thoughts of country recede, the screen takes 
over. At the end of the movie the heroine breaks 
the fourth wall and beckons me to follow her 
into a world of star-crossed romance and jealousy. 
The same gesture I had waited the best part of two 
years for someone else to make. Of course it never came
but the process refined my edges, prepared 
my senses for long seasons of education that I realize now 
were fundamentally erotic. Where’s the school
that teaches, part by part, the smoldering virtue 
of restlessness? I’d like my epitaph to shine 
through the grass that will grow over it. To the onlooker, 
not as a way of proclamation but genial conversation: 
friend, once I was there where you are 
and sometimes, it was unbearably beautiful.

3.            On a divan inside a blue living room sits a leopard 
in a lover’s dream. Soon the whole of her flames into hot 
air with a nonchalance you couldn’t quite believe a predator 
like that was capable of. I’m no deer. I have one horn
and little musk. Have you noticed— the black spots 
on cheetahs are the work of singular tips, whereas 
on a leopard’s skin are speckled lipstick rosettes. Why do 
I seek to remember this level of detail that can be googled 
at will, you ask? The answer is the same reason why poets 
chase an ephemeral metaphor or why in the middle of a cab 
journey while stuck in traffic you think about good
jokes to tell, so that you’re prepared for one such needful occasion. 
A good non sequitur soothes nerve endings. I call disparate
objects not out of wonder but because I too happened by extraordinary 
coalescence just after the waves of the poem had washed over.